Ruthie Kovanen
Ruthie is an Associate Licensed Mental Health Counselor. She enjoys working with children, teens, and adults to explore and heal from trauma. Work with clients to navigate feelings of stress and coping. Works with children and teens to explore emotions, thoughts, and difficult experiences with games, activities, and artmaking. Her goal is to create a counseling experience where you feel heard, understood, and safe to show up exactly as you are.
Ase Tojussen
Ase believes that all individuals are unique and special. Addiction looks different for everyone, and she believes recovery will be different for each individual as well. Her role is to help each client discover what recovery will look like for them, anything from complete abstinence to harm reduction. Together we develop a plan that will motivate them to do the work needed to achieve their recovery. She does her best to be real with clients because that is needed to build a trusting relationship.
Giita Clark
Giita has over 30 years as a Mental Health Counselor. She worked for Squaxin for the last 13 years. She is trained in family systems and cognitive therapies. She works with teens, adults and elders managing and coping with a variety of mental health issues. She is client centered, strength based, and solution focused. She believes in patient-counselor collaborative relationships to enhance wellness. Areas of expertise; relationship healing, life transitions, trauma recovery, personal identity conflicts and chronic pain.
Julie Anderson
Julie values the human experience, with all of its ups and downs, and believes people heal, grow, and change by being brave enough to talk about their experiences. She is a person-focused, trauma-informed therapist who incorporates several modalities into the work she does with clients. She enjoys educating clients about their mind/body experience and encouraging clients to listen to the messages they receive from their bodies. She sees clients of all ages and, when working with children, incorporates play therapy into the therapeutic experience.
Laurel Wolf
Laurel is a licensed mental health counselor. She brings warmth, humor, and patience to our work. She works best with people who are ready and willing to go deep and are open to exploring new ways of engaging with themselves and others.
She primarily uses Internal Family Systems (IFS), a trauma -informed model that honors the many parts of ourselves. It is by showing compassion to all parts of you, even the parts you wish to “get rid of” or “fix,” that allows for transformation and healing. She also uses Somatic Archaeology and helps “unearth” feelings, sensations, thoughts, and unhelpful generational patterns stuck in the mind, body, and spiritual self. Her areas of focus are: trauma, anxiety, depression, setting boundaries, building communication skills, grief and loss, self-esteem / self-love, building healthy relationships and LGBTQIA+ -affirming care.
Dr. Ferguson
Dr. Ferguson is our clinical psychologist/neuropsychologist. He earned his doctorate at University of Nevada, Reno and completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at University of British Columbia.
He works with children, adolescents, adults, and elders.
Among his specialties are extensive psychological evaluations to determine appropriate diagnosis and treatment plans, including depression versus bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders, ADHD, and autism evaluations. He provides psychological presurgical evaluations for transgender patients undergoing gender-affirming surgery and for patients undergoing bariatric surgery.
His assessment services also include neuropsychological evaluations for individuals concerned about their thinking or cognitive functions (say, after a traumatic brain injury or concussion), assessments for ruling in or ruling out progressive neurodegenerative conditions (e.g., Alzheimer's disease), and evaluations for identifying learning disabilities (e.g., Dyslexia).
He also provides individual psychotherapy. His main therapeutic approach is rooted in Contextual Behavior Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). ACT is based on the idea that psychological suffering is usually caused by problematic avoidance, cognitive entanglement (i.e., “cognitive fusion”), and the resulting failure to take needed behavioral steps that are consistent with core values.
The treatment program also includes components of traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychoeducation, and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) when appropriate.
Dr. Ferguson is dedicated to offering culturally competent and evidence-based care to Squaxin Island Tribal members, descendants, and all Tribal-affiliated individuals and their families.